Their purpose is to structure tabular data within your web documents. As mentioned in many of my previous articles, using tables is not exactly the best approach to build web pages, but even in 2011 there are lots of us using tables to display non tabular data instead of using div’s.

Before analyzing each of the elements, I would like to stress on something less known to many search engine optimization professionals: how search bots actually read information from web documents built with tables. It’s important to know this because, the way we lay out data with html tables, using <td>, <tr> or other elements, will affect how browsers render that document. Equally and maybe more importantly for search engine optimization is how search engine bots “read” web pages.

Humans read from top to bottom and left to right (western European languages). Browsers and bots are rendering and reading a html page from top to bottom, but not exactly from left to right. They will jump through <td>s and <tr>s depending on how you structure their way. In other words, what you see in a browser might be read differently by search engine bots.

Here’s an example of how search engine bots would crawl an html table structure:

They will look for the first opening instance of the <table> tag

Find the table head tag <thead>, then the first table row <tr>, then they will search for <th> tags which should contain tabular header data, and finally find the closing </thead>. Next they will aim for the <tbody> tag. The browser will automatically add (or imply) a tBody element if it is not present.

Look for the <tr>, the table row tags of the tBody and read the data inside the table data tags, the <td>s

If they find a closing </table> tag it means that the respective table has been closed.

Repeat the above for the next tables within the page

To visualize the above process described above take a look at the source code for a tabular structure (an excerpt from this page):

Tabular Data Structure

Why is it important to understand how search engine bots read the source code? There is (or it used to be) a strong belief that search engines give more importance to the text closer to the top of the source code. With the classic table implementation your <tbody> content that matters to search engines may be buried way down the code, depending on how much code and “noise” content you have before it.

Do a simple experiment. Identify your most heaviest pages in terms both kilobytes (as rended by browsers) and heavy top and left navigation data (specific for ecommerce sites). Take a look at the cached version in Google using the cache: command.

In case you see your cached version of that page containing a lot of irrelevant content on the top of the page and your main content buried down (or not present at all due to excessive irrelevant content indexed on the top) you should consider some alternatives: a) using the “table trick” described below or, better b) migrate to tableless development with CSS and div’s.

Let’s take a look a possible situation where irrelevant content could bury important content, i.e. a website with lots of links on the top menu and tens or hundreds navigation links on the left navigation section of the page:

The SEO “Table Trick”

So, what’s the SEO “table trick”? Insert an empty <td> right before your body content and move the navigation data after the body content.

The implementation behind this method (which is quite old, dating back from 2002) have been described here and here for pages built with tables.

A variation of the “table trick” is the “css trick”, described here which puts the content that matters (main body content) to the top of the source code, while moving “noise” content (header, navigation, footer) at the bottom. The page will render normally for browsers and users, but search engine bots will find the content first, then the rest.

Long time back, there was another SEO best practice to keep your pages under 100kb because of search engine crawling and indexing limitations. Later on that limit was “increased” to 300kb. The “table trick” and “css trick” described above came to help those days, but I think you don’t need to worry too much nowadays, for at least 2 reasons:

– This Wikipedia page is almost 700kb of pure text and is cached in Google, so size doesn’t seem to matter anymore with strong websites (and deep linked)

– Bing has a Vision-based Page Segmentation Algorithm (aka VIPS) which is used to identify the portion of your pages that contain the “body content” and remove navigation, menus and footer from their ranking algorithms (aka boilerplate content/text). Yahoo!has one too. Google also.

While it is important to understand how search engine bots read and index pages, your real focus should not be on using these techniques, but rather write quality, targeted content within your main body section of the page and trying to become authority in the niche.

As a final advice for the first part of the article, if you still design using tables, I encourage you to use the <tbody> tag where you start the main body tables, to give search engines a clue where the content that matter is, just in case the VIPS algos are failing.

Pitstop Media offers ROI focused SEO services. If you need a SEO company to help you rank #1 please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank first on Google in short periods of time, for highly competitive terms.

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Traian is Director of Search Marketing at Pitstop Media Inc. He has more than 11 years experience in helping small and medium businesses generate and convert organic traffic from search engines. Connect with Traian on Google+. He is also the author of the Ecommerce SEO book.

6 Responses to “HTML Table Elements and SEO – Part 1”

Interesting post. Especially since the Panda update, Google is probably looking at page layout more closely. I have a question for you though. The main content(our most important content) of our pages are within tables. Would it be a wise move to have our content outside of a table? And if so, should they be in or tags?

Tom, you don’t need to move the content outside tables, as long as it’s cached by search engines. If there’s hundreds of links and other “noise” content before main body section, and considering the businesses resources needed to move it out, you can consider.

Very interesting read about how tables are read by bots.
In Google search, a table will be shown as having “20+” items if the table contains 20+ items in the table, but only as long as this is without a break. If a list have 20 items, but if there is an ad or something in between item 10 and 11 on the table list, Google will show 10+ items instead.

Do you know if there is there a way to insert an ad or whatever else between items on a table list, without seemingly “breaking off” the table as far as Google search in concerned, so that Google will continue to show 20+ items in such an example.

Hi Barbra and thanks for commenting. This sound more like an design issues and I am not a designer by any means :). Maybe this could be done with CSS, or position the ad in a TD which belongs to the same table. Let me know if you find a solution.